The ability of shippers to send parcels from the loading dock to their final destinations in shorter time spans and at less cost has increased in recent years. The growth of the overnight carriers and two- and three- day delivery carriers has created vast fleets of transport vehicles representing each of the many transportation modes. These, in turn, benefit from efficient manifesting and logistical accounting.
Carriers are companies that provide services to their clients for facilitating the transport of letters, parcels, bulk goods, or anything that can be shipped by public, common, or specialized transport means. There is a great variety in the types and scope of services that can be provided by the individual carrier.
The growth of shipping has fueled the drive for efficiencies that each of the carriers has been developing. Technological advances and better methods of doing business have, in turn, spurred greater demand for carrier services. The net result is that the volume of parcels being shipped has continued to spiral upward.
Systems and methods have been proposed to more efficiently handle the increased volume of parcels and more efficiently choose the most cost-effective among the many carrier services that are available. Individual carriers have introduced systems and methods that are targeted to that particular carrier only. Shippers have looked for systems that provide them with a means to rate or service shop; these systems are called carrier manager systems. The object of all of these systems has been to send a parcel on from point A to point B, efficiently.
Carrier Management Systems, such as the E900 Carrier Management System, sold by Pitney Bowes Inc., the assignee of the present application, generally includes as peripheral elements: a microprocessor; keyboard; monitor; platform scale; printer; and, possibly, a scanner. The E900 system automatically prepares documents for shipping articles to any desired number of different receivers by any selected carrier or mode. The E900 carrier Management System data files are not platform independent, and therefore data files are prepared for the E900 system to work with specific operating systems. Each operating system or platform requires different data file structure, and the data files also require large amounts of memory.
The ability of carriers to respond to shippers' needs is based on the individual carrier's capacity. Carrier capacity is the space that is available at any given time in the vehicle/container representing the carrier's mode of transport. For every shipment that leaves the dock of a shipper bound for a particular destination, a carrier makes available a mode of transportation. Each mode of transportation has its unique vehicle for transport; such as freight cars via rail, containers via ship, cubic inches via truck, etc. This capacity must be rated in some manner according to the rating data developed and promulgated by each of the carriers in the form of rate charts.
Each carrier has its own rate structure for service charges. Typically, rate structures are complex and involve a variety of factors; these factors may include: distance from origin to destination; weight rating; dimensional rating; service rating; and mode of transport. Thus, the business rules for rating items to be transported vary greatly from carrier to carrier. Rating calculations may shift over time, depending upon shifts in the business or carrier climate. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a mechanism for updating how carrier rates are calculated. Additionally, it is desirable to provide a mechanism for storing rate data with a minimal size so that the data can be easily transmitted via a modem or intemet connection.
The prior art works well in embedded systems or in an intranet environment where the systems administrator or systems user has some measure of control over the operating system platforms that store data, apply rating charges, and store the data within a data center. In other systems that are not embedded, where there is no control over the operating system platforms, the prior art does not work as well because of its platform dependency. The advancement of data processing systems and the ability of varying logistics services applications to require data sharing for the purposes of optimizing logistics operations has created a definitive need for systems of varying architecture and with varying operating systems, to be able to use data of a single configuration.
As the capabilities of data processing systems has grown, so too have the requirements that are tasked to these systems. Greater speed has given rise to more detail oriented applications, greater memory capability has made memory-intensive applications more attractive, and detailed applications have lead to more wide-spread use of previously inaccessible data processing abilities. With the spiraling growth in data processing ability, there has grown a need for more efficient ways of programming that promote speed as well as flexibility. Flexibility, in particular, allows applications that have been designed in varied programming languages, or operating on different platforms, to be able to communicate without extensive system or file modification.
The use of the Internet for transfer of data provides a universal means of accessing new data for downloading. However, the transfer can take large amount of time, due to the sizes of the data files and the communications time such as, for example, by 56 k baud rate modem over a telephone line. Therefore, there is a need for data efficiency by creating smaller data files that are downloaded in less time than prior art data files. The smaller data file sizes are also advantageous since they take up less memory, which is helpful in today's environment where greater memory is available but is competed for by many large applications and data files.
Thus, one of the problems of the prior art is that data files are platform-dependent and updating data requires updating numerous data files configured for various platforms. Another problem of the prior art is that large data files sizes require longer transfer times. Another problem of the prior art is that larger data files take up large amounts of memory. Another problem of the prior art has been that updating data files requires updating of numerous different files configured for various platforms.